“You have no idea what it’s like being a kid now,” the Kid said. He may have even said “in the new millennium,” lord help us. Bear in mind: Nickelodeon is writing a lot of his material.
“Actually, I do,” I told him. “I know everything about being a kid and I don’t think it’s remarkably different now. In fact, I’d be curious if you could name a single thing that’s different about your life that isn’t related to technology.”
The Kid was stumped. (Hey, I’ve got 35 years on him.)
A few days later, I was buying vegetables at a local store and I noticed the hanging scale that allows one to estimate the weight. And, suddenly, I was 10 again, standing in line at the Giant on Ingelside, waiting for a man to weigh our produce and mark the price in grease pencil on a paper bag.
I adore grocery stores. In an increasingly heterogeneous shopping culture, they often contain what local character one can find. The names alone — the Giant, H.E.B., Piggly-Wiggly, Publix, Grand Union, Vons, Eddie’s, Kroger’s, Winn-Dixie, the Colonial, Harris Teeter — are evocative to me.
Grocery stores are often a window on how a city is changing. There are more and more Mexican and Central American staples in my local store, such as “queso blanco.” The low-carb Tropicana OJ is easy to find at SFW (Shoppers Food Warehouse, although I can’t help thinking of a movie by that name), but has to yet to show up at Whole Foods.
And for all this — there’s no chore I hate more than grocery shopping. I just like to go into the stores when I’m on vacation and there’s no particular urgency involved.
Not that this matters much, but this *is* the memory project, and your mention of the hanging scales dislodged one for me: Interviewing Morganna, baseball’s kissing bandit. She claimed her breasts weighed 15 pounds total. I asked the obvious follow-up question. She replied: “I was grocery shoppin’ at 2 in the mornin’ and just flopped ‘em up on the scale they have by the vegetables.”
I love this story. If it took a reverie about the Giant to dislodge Morganna’s breasts — well, you know what I mean — I’m all for it.
Laura,
I grew up in (actually, above) our “Mom & Pop” grocery store in an extremely small town in Michigan. You can see a picture of it at the URL above, or at
http://www.research.umbc.edu/%7Embradley/MYECHP2004.HTML
I thought it would be easy to write a comment about something that had played such a large role in my youth, but find it surprisingly hard.
Grocery stores do indeed reflect the larger changes in society and communities. During WWII, my dad managed a Kroger store–in a period in which Kroger stores weren’t noticeably different in size or apperance from neighborhood mom & pops and a Kroger manager did basically the same work as a Mom & Pop proprietor–for example, taking the bus to the store to stoke the coal furnace on Sunday afternoons in the winter. I learned my numbers by sorting the plastic price and ration point numbers, and my first reading was of labels (“Model” pipe tobacco, all the flavors of Campbell soups, etc.).
After the war, Kroger stores morphed into “supermarkets” (very small by today’s standards), and dad decided he didn’t want to be in a managerial bureaucracy, so he bought his own store–actually, he traded our house to the former owner as part of the deal. Supermarket chain stores continued to grow and the mom & pops continued to fade from the scene–ours folded in the late 1950s. I remember reading a Bernard Malamud short story a few years ago (can’t remember the title because it was never made into a Marx Brothers movie) about a guy who ran a small hardware store and faced new competition from a glitzy hardware superstore that opened across the street; that’s how I remember the waning days of our family enterprise.
I don’t think my dad ever really liked the store, but it was “what he did.” He took every opportunity to prod me to do well in school and get into college so I didn’t end up running a grocery store. Since I didn’t like working in the store either, I took his advice seriously. Having said all this, I have memories of the store that make me nostalgic–bulk roasted peanuts in a glass case heated with a large light bulb, occasionally snitching bulk candy and cookies (which dad later joked cut into his profits and caused the store to fold), and having dad around all the time (we lived upstairs).
In spite of all this, I rather like grocery shopping–although I haven’t run into Morganna the Kissing Bandit at the produce counter lately.
Cheers,
Mike
Safeway was my mother’s grocery of choice when I rode in the grocery cart, watching the aisles recede since kids can face backwards. Somehow I thought Safeway was the King of all grocery stores with the big “S”, emblazoned on the outside wall in red mosaic, comparable to Superman’s chest “S”. They did call them supermarkets, didn’t they?
I have a fondness for the old, small, general store groceries with wooden, plank floors. One floor survived in the beach town my mother took us to when we were kids. Bethany Beach was the �dry� family beach and the place we stayed was on the edge of town, but we�d hike to the main street and the general store there to get groceries and, what I�d pine for most, comic and monster magazines we couldn�t get near where we lived. A few years ago, I went down for a week of summer beach fun with some friends and not only did the grocery still have the plank floors, it was selling a reprint of a MAD magazine from when I was a boy in the early �60�s and so, like the issues of CREEPY I bought there decades before, it came home with me.